Desserts - better tasting, better for me!

There was just no way I was going to give up dessert during the hardest part of the winter, so I needed to find a different approach. Dessert knocks out my energy and makes me feel like crud usually and I couldn't take much more of that during these dragging winter months, but giving it up entirely? Please.

So I started searching Pinterest for sweets made from more nutritious ingredients and collecting them on a new board. Then testing was necessary. Some have turned out tasty, some very good, and my newest one . . . I've struck gold. I'm going to share all three recipes below, from tasty to GOLD.

I've adjusted all of the recipes as I go to better suit my tastes or available ingredients, I'll link the originals to all three I'm sharing today at the end of my version of the recipe. The pictures are not amazing because I just have no patience for working to make food all pretty and perfect only to consume it, but their nice enough to give you the idea. Now, the sweet treats!

First up the very functional daytime treat, the pumpkin cookie dough with chocolate chips. I'm doing a daily core workout every morning this month and I wanted to have a mid-morning snack that would be high in protein to feed my muscles and please my sweet tooth. Hence, this is a protein powder based treat. This is the one that's a nice tasty mid-day snack.

Pumpkin Cookie Dough

1/2 cup canned pumpkin puree
1/2 cup vanilla protein powder (I used vegan pea-protein powder)
1/2 cup almond flour
2T nut butter of choice (I've used peanut and almond, it turns out about the same)
2T maple syrup
1/2 tsp nutmeg pwd
1 tsp cinnamon pwd
1 tsp vanilla extract
dash of salt
milk of choice, 1T at a time as needed

dark chocolate chips (optional)

Throw all of the2 ingredients other than the milk and chocolate in the food processor. To get a nice smooth consistency add 1T of the milk of your choice at a time to the "dough". Once it's the texture you like it's ready to enjoy.

I like to divide it between four 4oz Ball canning jars. I'll put about a half dozen chocolate chips in the bottom of each jar, spoon the "dough" in, then top with half a dozen more chocolate chips or so. Screw on the lids and then refrigerate. I've kept them in the fridge up to five days and had it still be fresh.

The original recipe can be found here:  http://thebigmansworld.com/2015/09/20/healthy-pumpkin-cookie-dough-for-one/

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Next up, FUDGE. Now, I am not a fudge fan, but this has the right texture and is, in my opinion, so much better. This just melts away in your mouth and a small piece can create a whole lot of satisfaction after a meal. And the color is so pretty!

Blackberry Almond Fudge

1 - 7oz can of creamed coconut (I use this one, available at Common Ground Food Co-op)
1 cup of blackberries or black raspberries (you can use fresh or defrosted frozen ones)
2 T maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla paste or extract (paste has a better flavor)
1/4 tsp almond extract

Break up or cut up the creamed coconut if it is hard as a rock and put it in the food processor. Add the rest of the ingredients and process with a regular S blade. Leave the processor running for several minutes. Pour the resulting delightful magenta goo into a bread loaf pan or similar sized container, use a rubber spatula to get all of the goo out of the food processor bowl and into the container. Lid or cover with foil, then place the container in the refrigerator to set. It will be firm and ready to eat within an hour or so, it cuts easily with a butter knife. Stores well in the fridge at least five days. I pre-cut it into 1.5 inch squares so I can just pop in the fridge and grab a small square when the sweet tooth strikes, that's all it takes to satisfy me because this is just so darn good, I close my eyes and enjoy the melting texture.

The original recipe can be found here:  http://mywholefoodlife.com/2014/08/13/blueberry-bliss-bars/#sJ6skgQrGu5MkYU2.32

The first time I made these I used fresh blueberries as recommended but found the flavor of the blueberries is so mild that the final product just tasted like coconut. Nothing wrong with that if you love straight coconut flavor but I've found the blackberry version with a hint of almond is a whole higher magnitude of yummy.

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And now, for dessert gold. I do not exaggerate. As much as I love the blackberry almond fudge, I admit there are desserts full of a lot more sugar and made with flour, butter, etc that I love even more. This next dessert is sincerely among my top desserts in the world, I'm a texture person and the texture of this, along with the rich chocolate flavor, is just a knockout.

Dark Chocolate Mousse

2 ripe avocados
1/2 cup of high quality cocoa powder
1/2 cup maple syrup
3 T coconut oil
1 tsp vanilla paste (or extract)
1/2 a can of coconut milk (shake well before opening, you want it well mixed)

You know what to do - put it all in the food processor with a standard S blade and let it process for several minutes until silky smooth. I portioned this into five 4oz ball jars but it could easily be spread into six such jars and then served topped with a few raspberries or sliced strawberries. Once it's portioned out chill it to set, the texture magic happens after this has chilled for an hour or two.

This is excellent just like this, but I am tempted to cut the maple syrup to 1/4 cup next time and see if the results are still as pleasing, I am suspecting they would be. The original recipe had you chill the can of coconut milk and only use the thick cream layer that forms at the top of the can, tossing the watery remainder. This is just more headache than necessary and renders the rest of the can practically useless. I just upped the coconut oil and then used the well mixed coconut milk so the rest of the can is still perfect for using in other treats or curries. Don't have an immediate use for that other half a can? Put it in an ice cube tray and once it's frozen pop the coconut milk ice cubes into a zip lock. These are great in coffee or defrost them as needed for recipes (most standard ice cube trays make cubes that are about 2T of fluid when defrosted.)

This stuff is MAGIC, I can motivate all day if I promise myself one of these at the end of the day. So good.

Oh, and here's the original recipe:  http://www.naturallyloriel.com/creamy-dairy-free-chocolate-mousse/#_a5y_p=2658851

I'm tempted to add just a hint of mint extract to this next time, but I'm a little afraid to mess with a good thing. We shall see!

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So I'm not giving you the speech about dessert and moderation and all that. I'm just happy that my sweet treats as of late have been more nutritious and honestly, more satisfying. I love going into the fridge and seeing these cutely portioned little dessert options so I can treat myself any time I feel the need and still feel awesome afterwards. None of these make me feel the sleepy, cranky way I feel after most desserts, and I cal that a win.

Chickpea Omelettes from Mediterranean Heaven

Finally, I have conquered.

Chickpea flour has always *sounded* like a good idea. I've been meaning to try it out. I'd read several recipes making pizza crust with chickpea flour. It sounded easy.

From this assumption came the Chickpea Pizza Crust Disaster of 2014.

I put "chickpea crust pizza" on my cooking list for our summer vacation with friends in Michigan. I'm a pretty experienced cook so I thought, despite me never having made a single chickpea flour recipe that it would be a breeze. The doughy mess that took much, much too long to make that left us everyone forlorn and hungry that resulted turned me off from ever cooking with chickpea flour again. Well, I did try again, a chickpea flour pancake. Which was heavy and flavorless. DONE.

But I got lured in one more time when I saw this recipe for chickpea omelettes. I was looking for new meal ideas. I found several surfing around the internet and this one was my lowest choice, but it made it onto the list. We still had a bunch of chickpea flour from my brick-like chickpea pancake experiment, might as well try to use it up.

And the results were wonderful! These are soooo quick and easy, much quicker and easier than it even sounded to me in the recipe. It's truly like making pancakes, really quick ones.

This powdered mix does not look particularly promising, but the results are actually awesome!

My first deviation from the recipe is was pre-cooking all my vegetables. The author suggests there is no need to pre-cook the veggies but I disagree, they will release a lot of water and I prefer they do it before I put them into my omelette. My second deviation was the addition feta. These would be great vegan as well, but the addition of the feta was lovely. Last, we added sauce. The sauce made these pop. For the filling you can really used a 1/2 cup to 1 cup of any cooked vegetables minced up fine.

You can find the original recipe here:  http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2014/12/chickpea-omelet-mix.html

I love Organic Valley and I love feta. It takes such a little bit to add a lot of flavor, making it long-lasting and economical to use. 

Most important, make sure the batter is thin and spread the mix out super thin in the pan, like this:

The results:

Mediterranean Chickpea Omelettes

The omelette mix:

• 1 1/2 cups chickpea flour
• 3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 3 tablespoons ground flax seed
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground sumac
• 1 teaspoon salt (if desired)
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

The filling:

• 1 T of canola or olive oil
• 1/3 of a red onion, minced fine
• 2 big handfuls of baby spinach, then mince 
• 10-12 kalamata olives, minced

The sauce:

• 1/2 cup tahini 
• juice of one lemon
• salt and pepper
• pinch of cayenne 

Toppings (optional):

• 1/2 cup of diced tomatoes
• 3 oz of feta

Put all the dry ingredients for the mix in an air tight container and mix well with a fork. Set aside. 

Put the oil in a frying pan and heat over medium heat. Once the oil is hot add the onion, cook for two minutes, then add the spinach and olives. Cook another minute until the spinach is fully wilted. Set aside. 

For the sauce put all of the ingredients in a mason jar and mix with a fork or lid and shake until well combined. The resulting sauce will be like a clotted cream, if you'd like it thinner add a tablespoon of water and mix in well to thin the texture. 

Mix 2/3 cup of the omelette mix with 2/3 cup water, mix together well with a fork. Add in the pre-cooked vegetables. The texture of the mixture with the veggies are in it should be like thin pancake batter. If it's not, add another tablespoon of water and mix in. Keep adding a little water at a time until you have that thin pancake batter texture, it's important that the batter is thin, this is key. 

If your fry pan is not non-stick or a very well seasoned cast iron, oil the pan with a tsp or two of oil. Heat the pan over medium high heat for a minute, then add 1/4 of the omelette mix to the pan. Working quickly, use the back of a spoon to spread the mixtures as thinly as possible. Let the omelette cook for a minute on one side then check the bottom with a spatula. You're looking for the bottom to be lightly browned. Once it is, flip it and cook on the other side for another minute or so until both sides are lightly browned. Put on a plate and cover to keep warm until all omelettes are complete, four in all. 

Crumble the feta over the omelettes then spread out the chopped tomatoes evenly among the omelettes. Place a generous dollop of the sauce on each omelette. Enjoy!

Again, this sounds so much more complicated than it is, it's very quick! And the powered mix can be kept covered in the fridge pretty much indefinitely, just add the water and cooked veggies and fry up like pancakes, topping optional!

The delicious results. So, so good. So cheap. 

Walnut tacos?

It's been a long time and all of that. I don't know about anyone else, but I just don't enjoy those long, chatty intros when what I want is the recipe, so I'm going to get down to it.

I keep seeing recipes for tacos with walnuts as the basis for the protein "meat" main topping. It sounded well, weird, but I got more and more curious. So I read an few and then tweaked and changed here and there. Here's what I came up with:

Walnut taco meat:
1 cup raw walnuts
1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes, soaked
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp dried chipotle powder OR 1/2 of 1 canned chipotle
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 T oil (I used a canola/olive blend)
4 oz fresh white mushrooms, sliced or diced

Soak the sun dried tomatoes in some very hot water for 20 minutes.

While those are soaking, put the oil in a small frying pan and heat it a bit over medium heat. Add the mushrooms to the pan with a pinch of salt and fry for 3 minutes, stirring once. Turn off the heat.

Drain the sun dried tomatoes and discard the soaking water. (Or keep it for soup if you're making some soon, it's yummy) Put the sun dried tomatoes, the walnuts, the spices, the salt, and all the mushrooms in the food processor. Run for 3 seconds with a regular blade, then check the texture. We're aiming for a texture similar to ground beef. I usually have to scrape the sides down and run it one more time for 3-5 seconds.

And that's it. We served this up on tortillas with tomatoes, green onions, minced cilantro, hot sauce, and I added some plain unsweetened yogurt to mine (I like it just as well as sour cream and don't keep that stuff in the house, so yogurt it was.) We thought these might need refried beans on them as well but it was totally unnecessary, these were delicious as is! It's so nice when something so good for you turns out so tasty. Mike and I give this two thumbs way up, plus it was easy so we'll actually put this one into work day rotation. Next time I'll just start the tomatoes soaking in tap water in the morning and let them soak until I'm ready to make dinner, which will make this even faster, maybe 20 minutes tops to pull together. This is enough filling for 8-10 small tacos.

The walnut meat after processing. 

The delicious end result!

I've been working 60 hours a week for three weeks in a row now. Uhg. About 3.5 weeks ago now, I pledged to myself that I was cleaning up my eating habits, aiming for as little processed food and added sugars as possible. Other than two meals served in whole wheat wraps during that period, I've stuck to it. Oh, and that one hard cider after that impossible day, but come on, give a girl a break.

Thing is, working as much as I have been, my meals have mostly consisted of salads, cups of pre-made soup, and cottage cheese topped with veggies or fruit. I like salads, soups, and cottage cheese quite a bit, but still, I was really wanting a fuller meal tonight and got off work at 5pm, hurrah! In honor of this event, I created a new cheap, healthy, easy meal that I think is about to become a staple in our house. The meal has a bit of sugar in it and the processed sausage, but its affordable and full of fiber and greens, so again, I'm cutting myself some slack.

This is a what I call a "shorty" - a recipe made with many pre-concocted ingredients so its almost more heating things than cooking, but the result is still a satisfying home-cooked-feeling meal. Don't get me wrong, I try to avoid "cooking from cans" when I can, but this meal, can-ful as it is, is still a far healthier and cheaper option than going out to eat. The cost comes out, if done with vegan sausage, $3.29 a serving if made with ingredients from the co-op (I worked it out and if you replaced the vegan sausage with some local farm Triple S sausage its $3.40 a serving). Its not cheap enough to qualify for our Food For All program recipes which can all be made for $2 or less a serving from all CGFC ingredients, but still, $3.29 for a big satisfying bowl of delicious home-cooked goodness that is done in 15 minutes total? Sign me up.

Greens and Beans
4 Servings
1 T olive oil ($0.20-ish)
1 organic yellow onion, chopped ($1.50)
1 bunch local collard greens, remove tough stems, chop ($3.49, Prairerth Farm)
8oz Tofurky beer brats, sliced ($3.14)
2 - 15oz cans of Field Day organic maple & onion baked beans ($4.78)
1 tsp chipotle powder ($0.05-ish)

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan, once hot add the chopped onion. Cook over medium-high heat for a few minutes, then toss in the collards. Sprinkle on some salt and cook until the greens get bright and soften a bit, about 3 minutes. Push the greens to one side of the pan, then add the sausage. Cook until brown a bit on the edges touching the pan and hot, about 3 minutes (if it is animal sausage cook a few minutes longer and make sure it is cooked through, no pink in the middle, before proceeding to the next step). Add both cans of beans and the chipotle powder. Stir in well and continue to heat until a hot.

This makes generous, filling servings. I took a picture to show you the finished product . . . but it seems to have disappeared from my camera's memory, boo. Trust me, it looks like a delicious stew you can't wait to dive into. This recipe will leave you with 1 and a half  Tofurky sausages left over to flavor another meal later in the week, bonus! I think this also could be very good with a bit of Worcestershire sauce added as well, but it was mighty fine as in, and as I said, done in 15 minutes! I'm definitely making this one again after a long day at the office. So nice to know you can make something so quick and healthful after a long day at work that costs about half what a fast food "value meal" would cost that tastes soooo much better. And, for those interested, I threw the recipe into a calorie calculator and came up with 429 calories per serving. Very reasonable, no?

Do you have a go to very fast, very affordable, yet healthy dinner recipe for busy nights?

Quick Dinners From a Can (or "pumkin curry soup in a flash for those days")

Being home with a sick little boy today, I didn't get a lot done that I'd hoped to, but I did get to catch up on all the produce in my fridge that was desperately needing using up. What to do with all the beets and radishes  just about to go south? I started a beet kimchee ferment, if it turns out I'll post about it here soon. (I love fermenting!) I composted some stuff too, I have to admit, but I caught the cauliflower *just* before it was going to go off, thank goodness! Now I had to find something to do with it.

I discover cauliflower pretty late in life, as in, about three years ago. I was raised without it being a part of my diet and as an adult I just never discovered it until my mid-30s. Now I can't believe that, as it is one of my favorite vegetables. Most people think I am nuts when I say that, but its really true. So what did I do with this sad looking head of cauliflower? (This isn't the actual one I had, like I said, I had a sick kid at home with me, so I forgot to take my own pics. My cauliflower looked worse.)

I trimmed off the browning bits, then cut it up into florets and roasted it.

Roasted Cauliflower
1 big head cauliflower, cut into small florets
1 T olive oil
1 tsp ground cardamom
2 tsp tumeric
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Toss all the ingredients into a big bowl, stir until the cauliflower is well coated with all the other ingredients. Spread the mixture in a thin layer on metal cookie sheets and cook for 15 minutes, then stir, and return to the oven. Check it again in 10 more minutes, it should be starting to brown on the edges, that's a *good* thing. Stir again and return to the oven if not yet browned on many of its edges. Once browned, remove from the oven and let cool. It should look like this (again, not my pic):

Now I was running out of time, I was getting hungry and my partner would be home for dinner soon. What to do? Aha! My 15 min pumpkin curry soup! I had roasted up some winter squash already earlier in the day, but I've made this with canned pumpkin or butternut squash and it works great. Its a go-to fall meal for me for when I have no time to cook but want dinner to still be pretty healthy.

15 Min Pumpkin Curry Squash Soup
2 tsp cooking oil of your choice or ghee
1 yellow onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced (or tsp or so of garlic powder in you are in a real rush)
1 thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, minced
2 T curry powder blend of your choice
1 can coconut milk (lite or regular)
1 can (16oz) of pumpkin or butternut squash puree, plain
Vegetable broth

Put the oil or ghee in a soup pot, heat on med-high flame, then add the onion. Stir and cook until the onion is pretty soft, 5 minutes. Add the garlic and ginger, keep stirring and cooking 2-3 minutes more, then add the curry spice and stir to coat the onion for 1 minute. Pour the can of coconut milk into the pot and stir, scraping up any bits of the curry that got stuck to the pan. Add the pureed squash and mix well, then add veggie broth (or chicken for those who enjoy it) until its a consistency you like. Heat through. Done!

If you have the time, you can add broth until the soup is thinner than you like and then add 1/2 cup red lentils (has to be *red* ones, they cook up fast) and simmer the soup until the lentils have softened, about 10 minutes. Add more broth as needed until the lentils are done.

Here's where the cauliflower comes in:  put your lovely, tasty, easy-as-heck soup in bowls, then top with a big handful or two of your roasted cauliflower. Don't stir it in, just serve like that, its prettier that way, you can stir it in when you go to eat. Want to get really fancy? Serve with lime wedges and fresh minced cilantro. Didn't have time to do the cauliflower? No problem, serve with crusty bread, leftover rice, leftover quinoa, or as is!

Healthy and a heck of a lot cheaper than going out!

Autumn Returns

You always know it is coming, but still, fall always takes me by surprise, especially after a summer as wicked as the one we've had this year. The summer was very early, very hot, and there was a bad drought. It was the kind of summer you couldn't wait to put behind you, but also the kind you began to wonder if would ever end.

But end it did, and with pretty timing too. Just a day or so before the autumnal equinox, on came the cool cool nights. Walking with E to the farmer's market around 7:30 this morning, we were bundled in fleece-lined hoodies and knit hats, and our fingers and noses got quite cold. The first very fall market of the year I cannot resist all the autumn vegetables. After getting E his muffin from the Muffin Man, we rounded up some red cabbage, green beans, turnips, salad green, new potatoes, and winter squash. Most of the veggies went into a basic vegetable stew, but the winter squash I had other plans for. Potluck plans.

For E's 1st birthday, years back now, I went a bit nuts and made a lot of food for everyone. I love making up food for parties, but back then we were broke, I was working constantly, and E was a high-demands kid. It really was nuts, but maybe getting to do something I take so much pleasure in actually helped keep me sane. It was for that party that I made up the Winter Squash Spread, based on a vague memory of my friend Jessy making some sort of butternut squash spread for pizza when we both worked in a natural food store kitchen together. From this experiment the Squash Spread was born.

I always make it with butternut squash and it always comes out perfect. This time, I let the beauty of a red kuri squash lure me in and I used it instead. I'd never had a red kuri before and the flavor of the flesh was wonderful, but it had a grainier and drier texture than a butternut and it showed in the end results. I'd recommend using the butternut for this, it can't be beat.

Winter Squash Potluck Spread

1 medium butternut squash
2 bulbs of garlic
2 T grapeseed oil (or other oil that does well at high heat)
2 medium yellow onions, coarsely chopped
1 cup raw hazelnuts
salt and black pepper to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Chop the butternut squash in half lengthwise and scoop out all the stingy guts and seeds, place on a lightly oiled baking sheet. Break the bulbs of garlic into cloves and remove all the papery bits. Put half of the garlic cloves in the cavity of one squash half, the rest of the garlic in the cavity of the other half of the squash. Flip the squash halves over onto the baking tray with the garlic trapped between the squash and the pan. Poke the backs of both squash halves with a knife in a couple of places, this will allow the releasing of steam and help the squash cook more evenly. Bake for 45 minutes, then prick with a fork, if it slides in easily the squash is done, otherwise check again every 7-10 minutes until done.

While the squash cooks, place the hazelnuts on another baking tray with sides so they don't slide off and place in the oven for 3-5 minutes. The hazelnuts should become fragrant and darken just a tad. Take them out of the oven and pour them onto a dry dish towel. Let cool until just cool enough to handle the nuts in the towel, then use the towel to agitate and rub the hazelnuts, loosening their skins until most fall off. Don't worry about getting them all off, but you do want to get off as much of the skins as is possible without tons of effort. Put the nuts sans most of their skins in the food processor and process until very fine.

Put 1T of the oil in a skillet and add the onions over medium-low heat. Toss in the onion, stir in the oil, then turn down to low heat. Stir every few minutes and allow the onion to slowly caramelize. This process will take around 20 minutes to complete, the onions should be tender and lightly browned all over. Add the onions to the food processor bowl.

Once the squash is done cooking let it cook until you can touch it safely, then flip it over. Put the garlic in the food processor bowl, then scrape the flesh of the squash out of the skin and into the food processor bowl as well. Add salt and pepper, then process until very smooth.

Serve with baguette or pita chips, or use as a spread on pizza in place of the usual tomato sauce. If you have left overs you can thin it with a bit of broth and serve it with bread as a soup the next day. The soup freezes well for future use.

I feel silly, but I forgot to take a picture of the pretty end product all gussied up in one of my spouse's handmade pottery bowls. Ah well, trust me, it turns out a lovely golden color. Put it in a pretty bowl, put the bowl on a large place, and surround the bowl with your chips or bread slices, and then head off to your potluck party! Trust me, you'll be getting requests for the recipe for this tasty and healthy nosh!

To the Beat of the Knife and Skillet

Food sucks up time.

I touched on this a bit in my last post, the fact that we pay in extra dollars and loss of nutrition (usually) when we have others prepare our food rather than spend the time and develop the skills to prepare food ourselves. And I talked about how I am trying to get honest with myself about this and the way I chose to pay - in dollars and lost nutrients or in precious time I could be putting to many other things.

Our ancestors spent huge gobs of time preparing food. Whether they grew the food themselves or not, they still spent great amounts of time cleaning, trimming, mixing, and cooking food. Food was central to every day, almost every minute of the day. It was a constant focus between obtaining the food, preparing the food, consuming the food, and preserving the food. I'm not the first to observe this, I know. But I've been thinking about this a lot, the way I even remember my grandmother just 30 years ago being seemingly always in the kitchen. I know I've got rose-colored glasses on when looking back to that time, I am sure I do, but I don't remember grandma being miserable when in the kitchen and I do remember how happy and honored I felt on the occasion she'd give me something to do to help with the big meal she was working on. This only happened a few times as my grandma was very sick by the time I was 7 or so, but those memories stuck.

My father's mother had a tiny kitchen in a house where she was raising 11 children on a tight budget on 100% homemade food, some of it grown in her own garden. The steam of food releasing moisture as cooked seemed a constant in the background as my cousins ran around the house and in and out the backdoor that was located in that kitchen. Who could doubt, when grandma was still alive and well, that the kitchen was the heart of that house? My mother and aunts would crowd in it on holidays or family birthday parties, peeling vegetables, washing dishes, and talking and singing together. I resisted the kitchen duties after grandma died and as I grew because I began to see that only the women were expected to partake in these tasks while the men sat around or played sports. I decided I would not do kitchen work either if the Y chromosome types of my family deemed it not their job and got to play. Looking back, I see I kind of shorted myself on sharing the warmth and work of the kitchen, on overhearing the family stories and tales but I empathize with that young girl and rather respect her spunk.

My mother's mother had a very different kitchen and prepared very different food. She never baked and her cooking was more all-American, full of casseroles and such (my father's mother was Italian and her cooking reflected it) but still, the kitchen was the heart of the house. We'd go over to her house after school on Wednesdays and no matter where we roamed in the house or yard, there would be grandma making dinner in the kitchen, the anchor in the center of the house. She had this wonderful little bar you could sit at in her dinning room that looked into the kitchen and you could nibble on after-school snacks and chat with my always-smiling grandma as she peeled the potatoes or mixed up the meatloaf.

Cooking is work, a lot of work, and when it is left to us whether we want the task or not by societal expectations I can understand why it could be a drudgery. I think this idea, that preparing our food is drudgery forced on women, seeped into me and I missed how much food preparation was at the center of so many happy memories for me. When the work is shared or there is someone sitting nearby keeping you company and telling you about their day, perhaps the work is transformed.

I am thinking about this a lot because this will be my third week in a row of working around 60 hours and when all you do is eat, sleep, WORK, go home for a quick dinner, WORK again, come home to put your child to bed and then crash on the couch for an hour before sleeping society tells you you deserve to eat out. We hear it again and again, we're much too busy to cook, I've had a hard day so I'm dragging the family out for pizza, etc. I've had many, many days like this. But what I've started thinking lately, without noticing at first, is that if I am going to work this hard what I deserve is a healthy meal that is going to nourish my body and help me wake up alert in the morning. What I deserve is the fun of sitting at the dinning room table with my partner chopping up the cheap produce of the season to freeze and to savor the idea of how good it will taste to serve it up later and how proud and happy we'll feel doing so. What I am starting to think is, making food isn't some drudgery I have to wedge into my day and do on top of everything else, its a constant and comforting rhythm that turns my days into a dance of movement and planning and nourishment.



It was a joy to sit at my dinning room table tonight and peel and chop up two dozen mangos with my partner while my son played in the background. We didn't even talk really, we just enjoyed the companionable silence and the task in front of us. There is something really satisfying about the feel of a very sharp knife skimming down the curve of a mango, the skin falling away in smooth petals. There is something deeply satisfying about the full bowl of juicy fruit ready to be spread on cookie sheets and frozen for future enjoying, about the idea of stocking your larder for future meals. There is a pride and sense of simple accomplishment in getting a few things chopped up just before bed and stocked away in the fridge so you are ready to throw together a quick and healthy dinner for your family between commitments tomorrow. There is a part of me that say, "yes, this is good, this is not drudgery, this is a gift we get to partake of every single day."

Now if only I can start to see preparing food through that lens more days than not, wouldn't that be something?

We Pay Either Way

As most who read this know, I teach a class at Common Ground for free every month that I developed starting in January of '09 called, "Eating Healthy on a Budget" (EHOB). In the process of gathering the information from that class I learned a great deal and I've learned just as much if not more from the hundreds of people who have taken the class now.

With the community awareness of the class growing over the last two years, I've started to get requests to teach the class outside the confines of Common Ground. I've made forays into teaching the class in front of low income audiences full of folks who rarely if ever go to farmers' markets or natural food stores and I've bombed there. That's a very interesting story in of itself and one worthy of discussion, but not the one I'm planning to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the other kind of EHOB presentations I've done outside of Common Ground. I've put together a very abbreviated version of the class in powerpoint form that I can do as a talk in 25-30 minutes because I kept getting requests from University of Illinois groups, local churches, local environmental organizations and the like to do so.

One thing I've added to the presentation version of EHOB is more price comparisons. I already show folks in the full class a can of organic black beans and tell them the price, then make them guess how much the bag of dried beans I also have with me that would make the same amount of beans in the can would cost and the students are always pretty impressed with the difference. (It's around $2.00, by the way). But in need of a few more exciting visuals for the presentation version, I costed out a few things people tend to buy pre-made and what they cost to make from ingredients at the co-op. The results didn't surprise me *that* much at first, but they did make me curious. If it only costs $0.78 to make with all organic or local ingredients the same amount of lentil soup I get in a can at the store for $1.89 (conventionally, $2.49 organically), what about what it would cost to make favorite restaurant dishes?

I've not gotten around to in-depth costing I am ready to share in final form, but the process has already pointed out to me what a dramatic difference it makes to cook at home, even when you use the really "pricey" ingredients. We'll say to ourselves, "oh, that organic cheese is too expensive to use as our everyday cheese around the house!" but not blink at paying $7 at Panera for half a sandwich and a small cup of soup made from conventional ingredients in a factory and just heated up in a pan. We're not having an honest conversation with ourselves about food when we tell ourselves organic and high quality ingredients are too expensive but we then go out to eat several meals a week.

The truth is we live busy, busy lives. Sometimes, convenience is worth the price, just to have someone else make lunch or dinner. Thing is, we pay not only a lot out of our pocket books, we pay nutritionally too, are we really aware of that? Even when we get a big salad and some low-fat soup at the restaurant, the ingredients are from factory farms, shipped in plastic, full of pesticides, and often made months ago. And we pay far more for it than we would have paid to make the food at home with the very best, fresh ingredients.

And there's a reason prepared food costs more - because making food is work, time-consuming work. That's why we're often eating out in the first place, right? The salads you buy in the Common Ground deli can be made at home from the same ingredients for far less than you'll pay for a co-op deli salad and for good reason. Half or more of the cost of prepared food, in a restaurant or at home, is in the preparation. The preparation costs when you buy food out because people have to be paid to put in the minutes and hours of preparation we decided you couldn't afford (or didn't know how to) put into the food. At home, the time costs because we have to have it to put into the making of the food instead of other things. The cost of food is not just about the ingredients so, honestly, do we feel we its worth it to our health and our pocketbook to invest the time?

The answer isn't always "yes" for me. I work 40-60 hours a week depending what is going on at the co-op, right now, with a major expansion of the co-op looming, I'm working closer to the 60 end of the spectrum. My husband works 32-40 hours a week. We have a four year old son. Sometimes, despite my best intentions, I forget to coordinate the meals, make the meal plans, buy the ingredients. And sometimes I am just too damned tired and decide I don't want to make the food. I'm working to be honest with myself about this, about my choices, and to look at the real cost of them.

This weekend I am having one of my more food-ambitious swings. Despite a crazy long work week and having only one day off, I am feeling like making some food plans and executing them. So, today, I started with salad.



I pre-made these salads so they are ready to grab for lunches at work, already portioned out. All the ingredients are from the co-op.

I used:
- head of lettuce
- 3 green onions
- 1 medium carrot
- 1/8th of a head of red cabbage
- 1 pkg of baked tofu from the co-op deli
- 3 T of slivered almonds

This made 4 lunch portion salads. Without dressing, these are costing me $1.81 a piece, I am guessing 1 T of homemade dressing for each will cost me around $0.35, taking it to $2.16 a salad. A similar-sized salad at Common Ground's deli costs $3.95.

I turned the rest of the cabbage into homemade sauerkraut, but that's another post!

Next up, making a simple cold tomato and basil soup. That costs me about $1.22 a portion (1 cup, same as a "cup" at Common Ground's deli.) So lunch of a green salad with tofu and a cup of tomato soup from home will cost me around $3.50 with all fabulous organic ingredients, not attempting to use budget-conscious ingredients at all.

Is it worth the time? This week it is, to me. And it'll sure taste just as good if not better than the same sized soup-and-salad lunch at the restaurant around the corner from work that will charge me $7.99 and use non-organic ingredients. But, depending on what stresses next week brings, don't be surprised to see me at that same restaurant when you go out to lunch next Tuesday. We all do our best.

Something for Nothing

I'm not actually very enthusiastic about gardening. Well, no, that's not fair. I love watching the garden come to life, I love checking on my little garden beds, and I love most of all harvesting food from my very own garden beds. But I am a lazy gardener who does not, at least doesn't yet, enjoy the work that goes into a garden all that much. But I love the results and even my half-hearted efforts of the last four years have born some very rewarding fruit.

I planted radishes, a mescilun mix, red lettuce, white russian kale, arugula, and beets this spring. Soon after I planted, we started investigating a house. We weren't really looking to buy, but this house had everything we were dreaming of and . . . well, next thing you know, I was thinking to myself, "should I really bother with the garden, all the weeding and such? I mean, soon, this might not even be my garden." And, soon, the weeds started taking over. Everything still grew (other than the arugula, which didn't even start,but it was my first year trying it in the garden, c'est la vie)but other than harvesting the rewards, I've done nada. No weeding. No watering. Nothing. Its getting rather specularly wild back there.

I left several beds unplanted where I'd usually have bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes planted by now because it turns out we will be selling our home to the park district (we live right on a public park and they'd like to make more park out of our property) and buying a lovely new home right at the height of garden season. In these unplanted beds one of my very favorite weeds has taken over: lambsquarters. I have one whole bed so full of it and little else it looks like I purposefully planted it that way.

Many of us weed this stuff out all the time not knowing it is a tasty powerhouse of nutrition. Seriously, its a mild but delicious green, grows just about everywhere with no effort on our part, and is amazing for you. If you doubt me, check out the nutritional analysis here.



You can use lambsquarters any way you would use spinach, although I think of the taste as more like a mild asparagus. Here's a pic of it in its natural habitat, looks familiar, doesn't it? And here's a recipe for my favorite way to use it, in pesto.



Baa Baa Pesto
2 packed cups of fresh lambsquarters, leaves and very thin stems only
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, no stems, chopped up a bit
1/2 cup walnuts (toast them a bit in a skillet first for even richer flavor)
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2-3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
2T crumbled sheep feta from Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign (feel free to sub in any other feta or 1/4 cup grated hard Italian cheese like Parmesan or Asiago instead)
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Throw it all in the food processor or bender and blend until it forms a paste. Tada!

The feta and walnuts in this recipe aren't super cheap on first blush, I admit, but I love feta because you need so little of it to get a flavor punch that I think it is more useful ounce for ounce than most cheeses. Its what I call a high-impact ingredient - a lot of bang for your buck. Two tablespoons is less than 2 ounces, leaving you plenty of extra feta for fancying-up your eggs in the morning and tossing in salads. And yeah, walnuts aren't cheap, but they are nutritionally fabulous, full of omega-3 fatty acids, and again, add a lot of flavor for your buck.

All said, I made this pesto for about $4 and it will be enough for two meals for our family, easy. I am tossing it with quinoa, cherry tomatoes, and summer squash tonight. Later this week I will slather it on as a base for homemade pizza and top with lots and lots of veggies.

Three more quick notes on this recipe:
1. Vegans, sub out the cheese for 2-4T of nutritional yeast (to your tastes), absolutely yummy!
2. This pesto freezes great, I put it in 1/2 pint Ball canning jars and throw it in the freezer for up to 3 months. Just make sure the container is freezer-safe and air tight and you are good to go.
2. If you are going to store the pesto for a day or longer the very top of it will darken and discolor. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you don't want it to discolor top it with a thin layer of olive oil after packaging to prevent it.

Comfort Food

We've all got them. I'm talking about comfort foods that bring back a very specific memory or warm feeling from childhood. Many of mine are not-so-healthy, but one of the big exceptions is my great grandma Fiocchi's Italian bean soup. While I have vague memories of my still-agile great grandmother bustling in her kitchen making this soup when I was very, very young, my real memories of this soup are from my mother's kitchen. I adored this soup, the tender bits of potato were my very favorite part, my mom always cut them very small and uniform and there was something about that exact way she chopped them every time that made the soup extra special for me. And there was this flavor, this one really rich flavor in it that I couldn't put my finger on as a child or teen. I now know it was the flavor of gobs of fresh parsley, adding it to any soup or sauce is still an almost guaranteed way to make me fall in love with a dish.

All of great grandma's recipes that had been transcribed directly from great grandma by one of her daughters and my mom photocopied them all and gave them to me to use in my own kitchen when I got married. Even though I only use a few of the recipes now as a vegetarian (many contain meat)and others I just haven't gotten around to trying, this collection of recipes is to this day my most treasured wedding present. The food processor died long ago, the towel sets wore out, but this collection of recipes still has a special place on my cookbook shelf. I've made adjustments to the way my great grandma prepared the soup, but the happy warm feeling it brings me to taste it is just the same. I look forward to passing the recipe down to my son some day. Maybe on his wedding day.

Below is the recipe as I inherited it, exactly as my great grandma dictated it, meat left in. Its a very simple recipe with few ingredients, like all recipes for the best comfort food. There are lots of recipes that are complex and intricate that we can bring out to enliven a celebration or holiday, but comfort food is meant to be easy, everyday food. I've added my adjustments and comments in parenthesis.

"Italian Bean Soup

In about 3 quarts of water, cook about 1 cup of rice, or diallini or salad macs (I use whole wheat macaroni) and 1 medium diced potato (skin left on.) Add the sauce (the sauce refers to the rest of the recipe, below.) Salt to taste. Cook until rice or ditalini are cooked. Add 1 can kidney beans or Roman beans (I use 1.5 cups kidney and add 1.5 cups garbanzos to replace the meat in the recipe.)

Bean Soup Sauce
2 T cooking oil or chopped salt pork (I use cooking olive oil)
1 T ground pork (again, I leave this out usually, although Gimme Lean "ground beef" is a great veggie substitute in this recipe if you want to leave that element of flavor/texture in the dish)
1 large or 2 medium cloves garlic
1 cup chopped parsley
1 cup tomato or tomato juice (my mom always uses juice, so that's generally what I use, but this is a great place to use up some over-ripe tomatoes in the summer too)
salt to taste

If chopped salt pork is used, saute it a bit before adding the ground pork. With oil, you can start right off. Saute until ground meat is dry (mom's note is to add the garlic with the meat, it was left out of the recipe by great grandma). Add the parsley and tomato. Allow it to simmer about 1/2 hour. (Add the "sauce" to the water, potato, and pasta, then do the simmering.) "

And yes, it is very, very affordable to make, even with the ground pork. To make it a truly "Food for All" recipe, steal a page from the Italians by putting a piece or hunk of stale bread in the bottom of each serving bowl and ladling the soup over. Not only do you get to use up bread that otherwise might have gone to waste, it adds a delicious heartiness and texture to the soup.

Sloppy Georges!

I’ve been wanting to come up with a good vegetarian sloppy joe recipe for the Food For All recipe series for a while now. I thought it wouldn’t be that hard, I’d just look up a sloppy joe recipe and switch out cooked lentils for the ground meat and “tada!” I’d have another easy and tasty FFA recipe. My motives were a good part selfish. I loved my mom’s sloppy joes as a kid and I’ve been wanting to develop a vegetarian version I really enjoyed for many years now.

I started with calling up mom and asking for her sloppy joe recipe. Turns out, its made mostly of bottled ketchup and when I added up the cost, even after substituting lentils for the ground meat, it was too expensive to be a FFA recipe when made with organic ingredients and well, wasn’t all that healthy either. I try to get some nutritional balance into FFA recipes and make sure every one of them contains at least one vegetable. Unless you counted the tomatoes in the ketchup as a veggie, my mom’s recipe, while super tasty, wasn’t going to cut the FFA standards for price or for nutrition.

To address the cost I tried mixing up a sloppy joe sauce recipe I found that used tomato paste instead of ketchup. Despite all the things the recipe called for adding to the sauce, it still ended up tasting just like tomato paste and having the same unfortunate texture. After eating a bowl full of tomato paste slathered lentils on bread, my enthusiasm for this culinary project severely waned.

After finishing up the SNAP Challenge of eating on only $4.50 a day last week, my enthusiasm for creating new FFA recipes renewed. During the Challenge the only thing that kept me sane was having those FFA recipes to fall back on, which answered the question, “what’s for dinner?” without having to do crazy spreadsheets for each meal I cooked to make sure it came in on budget. The FFA recipes are already costed out and nutritionally balanced and after using them for the SNAP Challenge I truly realized what a helpful tool they are for people trying to eat a healthy diet on a tight budget. I was mulling a few ideas over in my head for FFA recipes while in Indianapolis this weekend celebrating my 5th wedding anniversary with my husband, Mike. For lunch on Saturday we went to one of our favorite Indy dining spots, the Three Sisters Café. Three Sisters serves meat, but has an extensive vegetarian offerings section that we consistently find delightful.

And what did I find on the Three Sisters menu? I’d always past over an offering called, “barbequed grains.” It just didn’t sound that appetizing and when you read the description of mixed grains in a apple butter barbeque sauce with sweet potato on a wheat bun it didn’t sound much better. Mixed grains on a whole grain bun? Sounded boring as heck. I continued down the menu when suddenly it occurred to me, maybe it’s like a sloppy joe! I asked the waitress and, indeed, she confirmed that the unfortunately named dish was a vegetarian sloppy joe type of deal. I ordered it and was convinced that whole grain berries on a wheat bun actually works quite nicely. I went home armed with a plan for a new FFA recipe.

I made my own version of the Three Sisters barbequed grains tonight and it turned out delicious. Its not quite a sloppy joe flavor, so I’ve renamed it Sloppy Georges (G being for both George and grains.) I’ve costed it out and what would otherwise be a very cheap meal still barely qualified for FFA ($2 a serving or less) due to the high cost of the organic bread it is served on. When you get into processed food products like bread, organic food really does get pretty darn costly. I’m kind of amazed I was able to fit it into a FFA recipe at all.

I’d like to try this recipe with lentils in place of the wheat berries sometime soon to make the dish more nutritionally diverse, instead of serving wheat berries on wheat bread. Its still nutritionally pretty darn great, but lentils would make it even more so. At this point I need to cook it still to check that the texture works and that the lentils don’t take the price too high for FFA. Once I try it I’ll post how it went.

Sloppy Georges
1 cup dry wheat berries (bulk bins)
1 T canola oil
½ a large onion, any color, sliced in thin half moon slices
1 medium carrot, shredded
½ a medium yam, shredded
8 slices of any Rudi’s whole grain organic bread

the sauce
1 T canola oil
½ a large onion, any color, minced fine
¾ cup prepared apple butter
¼ cup ketchup (Muir Glen is cheapest per ounce)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 T liquid smoke (not available at the co-op)
¼ tsp red pepper flakes (bulk herb bins)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

For the sauce: heat the oil in a small saucepan, then add the minced onion, stirring frequently. Cook for 3-5 minutes, then add all other ingredients and turn off the heat. Set aside.
For the topping: place the wheat berries in 2 cups water in a small saucepan with a pinch of salt over high heat with the lid on. Once boiling take down to a simmer and let cook 50 to 60 minutes. They will still be chewy and hold their shape. Drain the berries and set aside. While the wheat berries are cooking, place the canola oil in a fry pan and add the onion. Cook over medium heat for 3-5 minutes and the onion is translucent, then add the shredded carrot and yam. Cook, stirring frequently, for another 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, then mix in the wheat berries and sauce. Toast the bread and serve each person two slices of the toast topped with an 1/8 of the wheat berry topping, open-face style.

My camera either got seriously misplaced or stolen this weekend in Indy, so I apologize for the lack of pics, I would have loved to have shared snapshots of our delicious dinner with you!

Oh, SNAP!

My SNAP Challenge wrapped up Friday, seven days of eating on only $4.50 a day. I was able to stuck to the budget eating only organic and local foods from Common Ground, the farmer’s market, and my garden the entire week with all food consumed paid for from that budget except one free bowl of soup. I was able to consume 1500-2100 calories a day every day and to prepare all the food I ate myself while working 40 hours plus a week.

So, eating organically and locally on a SNAP budget is no problem, right? If you’ve been reading along with my blog through the challenge you know this is not at all true. I worked my butt off to manage it and I have years of cooking experience and have already been focusing for the last year and a half on creating nutritious meals on a tight budget from organic and local ingredients. While I pulled off sticking to the budget and maintaining the rules of the SNAP Challenge for all meals but one, as the week progressed my lack of time to properly plan began to show. And as each meal passed where I had to scramble to figure out what to eat on my budget due to lack of time to plan, it got worse. I felt more frazzled, more worried about food when I was trying to work on other things, and that led to more hunger and distraction.

It became crystal clear to me how important good food and access to it is to our functioning over the week of the challenge. If I properly planned my meals, had my food ready for when meal time came around and made sure to have my meals and snacks at appropriate times I felt well nourished and did not experience hunger. When this planning slipped and I didn’t have affordable, nutritious food ready everything went to heck. If you’ve ever been poor, you know things go to heck a lot. When you don’t have money to put toward solving problems, when day to day things going wrong like getting a flat tire or your child coming down ill so they can’t go to school is likely to turn into a fiscal crisis, well, you have a lot of stress in your life. And, as we can all attest, stress tends to lead to no time to cook meals or take proper care of yourself. I often feel functioning well in my life is a tightrope walk now when I have the means to pay for the flat tire or take the day off to care for my son, it doesn’t take much to throw off my life enough to make it neigh impossible to find time to cook nutritious food. When I added the stress of a very tight food budget, it became much harder.

I wanted to take the SNAP Challenge to illustrate that it is possible to eat very nutritious food on a budget, at the same time, I wanted to take it to raise awareness about hunger and how it takes cooking and budgeting skills to make eating well possible for the majority of us. I often hear that eating healthy is expensive and I sometimes hear from people that they feel the food at Common Ground is “too expensive.” We could spend a great deal of time debating the cost of food and why it costs what it does (which I am happy to get into in the future on this blog or in person) but we need to look at why these nutritious organic foods like vegetables, fruits, eggs and the like are so much more expensive than trans-fat-filled, sugar-laden, processed food products. The answer can be found by looking at the Farm Bill that is passed every five years in our country that decides where the farming subsidies will go and what kinds of food production will be supported. I suggest that rather than shaking our fists at the cost of wholesome, organic food at community-owned stores like the co-op where no one is out to make a profit we instead channel our energy into understanding why the least nutritious food, the most health-damaging food, is the cheapest in our country and what we can do to change that.

Let’s also look at what we are teaching in schools about food and money. I am often heard to say that what I am really teaching in my “Healthy Eating on a Budget” class that I offer for free at the co-op every month is healthy eating home ec 101. Who amongst us learned how to budget in school? How to make a weekly meal plan? Learned how to make cheap nutritious meals and about what ingredients gave you the most nutritious bang for your buck? These are skills we need to make sure kids are gaining in schools and we need to inquire about what our schools are teaching now and do what we can to help them bring these critical life skills into their curriculums. In many cases, schools are no longer set up to teach cooking and that’s a travesty. If we do not know how to take care of ourselves, how to do the most basic and core things like feed our bodies in a way that supports our health, we can expect that we are going to struggle with illnesses and issues caused by poor nutrition.

I don’t have all the answers, not one of us does. But by asking questions, getting involved, having tough discussions, and sharing ideas and skills with each other I believe we can find them. The SNAP Challenge stimulated some tough discussions, the sharing of ideas and skills, and getting involved. I think that made it very worth doing and a great success. Thank you to the Eastern Illinois Food Bank for inviting me to take part.

As for the future of this blog, I am inspired now to keep blogging about affordable and nutritious meals. I'll be posting at least once a week with recipes, tips, and photos about making great food on the cheap with organic and local ingredients. If there is a topic you'd like to see me cover, a recipe or a tip you'd like to share, please let me know!

Day 6, No Witty Title, I'm Running Ragged

So, just to be up front, there are no pictures again. Things have been a little harried.

Last night I felt so on it. My partner was exhausted from working 10 and 11 hours days all this week so I cooked us all dinner then put him to bed at 7:30, got my son down at 8:30, and then cooked a lovely lentil stew from cheap and nutritious ingredients for today’s lunch. So on it. I ate my usual fabulous oatmeal breakfast, got my son and I packed and out the door 10 minutes ahead of schedule and the day was off to a great start. Oh yeah, sooooo on it. I was feeling great. Until I started getting hungry around 10:30 am and realized I had, once again, left my lunch at home and that I had solid meetings ahead of me except from 11:45 to noon when I had planned to scarf my lunch. While I live close to the co-op, I don’t live close enough to run home eat and run back in 15 minutes by a long shot.

And so, I led meetings while others scarfed their lunch and became more and more jealous and cranky. Finally, I gave in and spent $1.05 of my $4.50 a day budget on a vegan protein bar. That helped, but made me cranky with myself for screwing up my budget for the day because it would mean a small dinner at best. That would be annoying most days, but I started work at 8 today and other than a few little breaks, was scheduled to be at work until between 8 and 10pm to oversee the quarterly inventory at the co-op and the instillation of our third register lane. That’s the thing with hunger, it never lets up. Today was just to chaotic and stressful to contemplate rationing every bite of food and counting each penny, I’d have rather just turned off my need/desire to eat entirely. If only it were so easy.

So far today, I’ve eaten:
The usual oatmeal goodness with a few extra chocolate chips (it was going to be a loooong day, I felt I needed the pick-me-up): $0.70
The protein bar: $1.05
The lentil stew: $0.87
I had thought that was going to be all I could afford today when I was running around and trying to keep track of my eating in my head, but when I wrote this out I realized, hey, I’ve only spent $2.64! So, on a short break home I defrosted a bunch of black beans, tossed them in a pan with a diced up raw tomato from my garden and some spices and then ate it with half an avocado with a few Brazil nuts for good measure and got to:
TOTAL: $4.32
So I’m going to treat myself to a $0.15 mini fair trade chocolate to get me through the rest of this inventory night. Thank the gods.
What’s coming back to me today is the cumulative toll that eating on such a tight budget takes on you when you are balancing a full life. When you’ve got one (or more) demanding job, kids, bills hanging over your head, the stress of having to find time to eat is bad enough. Then try eating well enough that you don’t feel like hell and compromise your health while being on a tiny food budget. This is the reality so many people are living with, day in and day out.

Day 5 and Still Alive!

I mostly picked that title because it was catchy, but there’s some truth behind it too. There were definitely times during day 3 of the SNAP Challenge that I started thinking, “I’m trying to work 45 plus a week, my partner’s boss is out of town so he’s working overtime, I have a guest in town, my toddler is feeling more demanding than usual this week . . . maybe it is just not reasonable to try to do this challenge this week. Maybe I should throw in the towel, how am I going to find time to keep cooking and cleaning this much?” I didn’t give in to this voice, but I was tempted. And now, at the 5th day, its starting to feel more natural, I am getting into the swing of it. That said, I broke the rules big time today.

Part of the SNAP Challenge rules is NO free food, you’ve got to make it on the $4.50 per day allotment. From the beginning I said I would follow this rule but items from my garden would not have this rule applied to them, as SNAP covers the cost of seeds and most of my plants came from free seed anyway. I’ve said it a lot this week and I’ll say it again, growing food is easier than it seems and a terrifically cheap way to get fresh vegetables and even fruit (in the right seasons) into your diet. The reason for the “no free food” rule is to get a feel for what its like for those who are struggling the most. Most everyone I know who’s ever been on food stamps has used their social network as a support and source of food in hard times. One friend’s church knew of her plight and happily fed her family at the weekly potluck without asking them to bring anything and even sent home leftovers with them as often as they could. Many a friend dined with local family on a regular basis to help cover the gap. Everyone I know worked opportunities like out of date food at their bagel joint job or leftover donuts in the coffee room. There are as many different ingenuitive ways of sourcing free food now and again as there are people on SNAP and when you are poor, you get pretty darn ingenuitive. So why no free food if we are trying to better understand the experience of those forced to use SNAP to help get by? Because some people are not only fiscally poor, but also poor in human relationships or resources. For some, the family and friends who they rely on around them are just as bad off, if not worse, than they are. For a percentage, there are no resources beyond SNAP.

So, understanding where the rule came from, I am accepted it and have adhered to it. Until today. As I’ve mentioned, my dad was in town Monday and Tuesday. Monday night when I cooked a Food For All recipe for dinner I remembered to make 1.5 times the regular recipe so there would be leftovers for my lunch the next day despite having an extra person at the table with a big appetite. When I made the delicious (man was it good!) shepard’s pie Food For All recipe last night, I forgot to increase it so there were no leftovers for lunch today. And, with a guest in town and a long work day, I forgot to scrounge up something else to take for lunch. So, it got to lunch hour today and I realized, “drat, I have nothing to eat!” I looked around the co-op and there wasn’t much I could afford that was instantly edible. Hmm. I was wandering around looking lost when one of the deli staff asked me what was the matter. When I explained, she said, “oh, but we have some out of date corn chowder in the walk-in, its free, you could have that for lunch!” I thought about the rules for a minute, then I thought about how hungry I was and how my next meeting started in 15 minutes and how I wouldn’t have another pause in meetings for hours. I gratefully took the corn chowder and ate it.

Now, I could have simply bought something from the deli, I have the money to do that, but that felt like a true break from the spirit of the challenge. Accepting free food that I felt sheepish and not so great about taking felt a lot more like what I remember feeding myself when I was poor to be like. You often do find yourself accepting free food because someone wants to be generous or because you just need to but you don’t feel good about it. It feels out of balance to be constantly accepting free meals from a friend you can’t repay the favor to or your pride hates taking it or something. Free food rarely turns out feeling free in your heart of hearts, no matter what the intention of the giver, when you can’t repay it in some manner.

I also had no plan for dinner when 4:30 rolled around and it was time to get ready to pick up my son from daycare. Uhg, how could I have let my planning get so behind and bungled! Thank goodness that hunger (and I was definitely hungry already) spurred creativity. I came up with a simple idea. I would roast carrots (cheap), russet potatoes (cheap), beets (from my garden), and red onions (from my garden) and serve them with a simple mustard dressing over quinoa. It turned out great, and thanks to my garden, affordable! A secret about quinoa – while it is just about the priciest grain around, its also the most nutritious and it increases in volume with cooking more than any other grain I’ve tried! I bought one cup of quinoa and it made three generous beds for our roasted veggies. I tossed the greens from the beets into the quinoa for extra vitamin action, but otherwise just cooked it up plain, its got a natural nutty flavor to it that doesn’t need much help to be tasty. I’m getting addicted to throwing dandelion greens or whatever other free greens I can get out of my garden into everything to increase nutrients. I’ve found when you mince them up small you don’t even really taste them much and they can blend into just about anything at all savory. I put them in the sheppard’s pie last night, and tossed them in with the beet greens and the quinoa today.

I keep forgetting my camera at work so, once again, no pics today. Sorry about that, dinner was so pretty I wish I could have shared a few shots of it in the handmade pottery bowls from Mike’s wheel. I will try my darnedest to remember to bring home the camera tomorrow.

A co-worker overheard me talking about how I was getting only about 1500 to 2000 calories a day doing the SNAP Challenge on all local and organic food and how I felt it really wouldn’t be possible for an active adult male, athlete of any gender, or active teen to eat exclusively organic and local food on SNAP (they could definitely do a significant part of their food organic, but not all of it, to get adequate calories.) She disagreed, pointing out that when her husband and her were really struggling fiscally in the past they got by on organic beans and rice, meal after meal, and how at least that was better nutrition than succumbing to the fast food dollar menu. And she’s right. That’s not the perspective I am taking the Challenge from, I am trying to create actual well balanced meals, but she’s right that it can be done and that people are driven to choices like that all the time. If it’s a nutritional choice between kidney beans and whole grain brown rice and a burger and fries, the organic beans and rice will win hands down.

The conversations and thoughts stimulated by taking this Challenge are still very engaging to me, and, despite the extra hard work involved during a challenging week, I am glad I am taking it.

Day 3, the Hornet's Nest Around Food

Oh sing, sing, the praises of the modest vegetable garden!

Why? I’ll tell you why. But first, what I ate today:
Breakfast: My usual oatmeal concoction, $0.63
Lunch: On sale organic yogurt cup, $1.09; Organic banana, $0.25
Afternoon snack: a whole organic avocado, $1.49; some cherry tomatoes from my garden
Dinner: Tamale pie (a Food for All recipe), $0.96
TOTAL: $4.42

I just don’t get tired of that oatmeal concoction, yum! This afternoon I wanted an avocado sooo much. I meant to eat half of it with dinner but by mid afternoon I just to a spoon to the whole darn thing. And you know what? I am hungry right now despite eating a whole avocado.

To help with my afternoon avocado lapse, I picked a dinner I could use a lot of ingredients out of my garden for. For the tamale pie I used 1 cup of chopped fresh tomatoes from my garden, removed the carrot from the recipe and replaced it with a mess of fresh kale from my garden, exchanged two red bell peppers from my garden for the green bell pepper in the recipe, and used an onion from my garden. The result was a very filling, cheap meal that was entirely organic. My dad is in town helping us finish some work on our house and I served the tamale pie to both him and my partner, Mike. Both are big eaters. Both declared the meal yummy and filling! I knew I’d done well when my dad asked me toward the end of dinner, “so, when are you starting that food stamp challenge thing you told us about?” “I’m doing it now, this is one of my super cheap meals,” I replied. “Oh, wow, because this is really good,” dad replied. Score!

But the reality is, by day three, I am thinking a lot about food. I catch myself fantasizing about food and when I estimate my calories for the day I know why – because I am eating about 1500-2000 calories a day. That’s not starvation level or anything, but it is weigh loss level for a woman of my size and activity level, for sure. It is certainly not enough food for an active man or teen. And it is taking a lot of time. Do I usually cook from scratch, boil my own beans at home, etc.? Yes. But do I have to add up every penny and plan this much? No. And do I have to hike back to my house when I forget the lunch I packed? No, I just eat from the co-op deli and eat the packed lunch the next day. Heck, I go through whole weeks where I am working so much that I don’t have time to pack lunches and my partner and I pay for meals at work. That option is completely gone now. I have to find the time or I don’t eat. Who here doesn’t go straight to eating out when under stress? Had a horrible day at work or school and still have work you need to do all evening? I don’t know about you, but I often relieve some of the stress and work load by going out for a meal between all the responsibilities. With that option gone, I feel I am honestly more stressed, just knowing that is right out no matter how hard things get that day.

Someone called the co-op yesterday and gave one of the staff an earful about my efforts with the SNAP Challenge and the Food for All recipes. She was very angry. She felt the recipes were misleading because we were claiming they cost $1 to $2 a portion but you had to buy all these ingredients to make them so you had to outlay much more at first. She was angry because she felt we had to be full of it claiming these healthy meals could be made for so little when some radio DJs she listens to on WIXY say they tried doing the SNAP Challenge with conventional food and could not make it work so how could we possibly be implying it could be done on organic food?

Let’s be clear, I’ve never said that one could definitely eat a well-rounded diet made up entirely of organic and local foods on a SNAP allotment, I simply said I was going to give it a try. I am giving it a try, and its only kind of working, and I’m being honest about that. As for the recipes, I never claimed you could put $5 worth of product in a basket at the co-op and go home and cook dinner for four, the recipes prices are based on what the actual food that is prepared in the recipe costs with the assumption that you have or are building a basic pantry of ingredients you can make these recipes from. But, in reality, this caller didn’t want a response. She didn’t ask questions, listen to explanations, or share things she’d like to see the co-op do differently. She just needed somewhere to vent her frustration, and the co-op ended up being that place.

There is a lot to be frustrated about. There is a lot of anger simmering just under the surface in our culture about poverty, the fiscal inequities of our country, and about our relationship to food. I knew when I took this challenge in such a public way I was risking being a lightning rod for some of that anger and was possibly putting the co-op in that position too. And you know what? That’s okay. The co-op’s mission isn’t to only forward local and organic food, it’s also to build strong community around food. To do that, we’re going to have to start talking, especially about the touchy stuff like accessibility, eating habits, class, our responsibility for our relationship with food, and more. Real conversations about such topics are going to stir up strong emotions for many of us, that’s just going to go with the territory. And that’s healthy. Here’s hoping we can find the courage to keep having these conversations and find the maturity to come to them with open minds and basic respect for one another’s good intentions.

Day 2 Wrap-Up

Let's dive right in, shall we?

Breakfast -
organic rolled oats with peanut butter, honey, sliced banana, and a few chocolate chips, $0.63
Lunch -
Ramrong Over Noodles (Food for All recipe, leftovers from last night), $1.62
Snack -
mini Equal Exchange chocolate $0.13
4 org corn chips and 2 T homemade salsa, guessing around $0.40
small handful raw almonds $0.22
Dinner -
Yam covered in black bean stew $1.10
Dessert -
made up rice pudding thingee $0.35
TOTAL for Day 2: $4.45

I was hungry when I woke today, and I was crabby about anything that got between me and getting breakfast made, fast. I again found it very satisfying and again craved a mid-morning snack and skipped it due to lack of funds. Today was the annual meeting of owners at Common Ground and it was, as always, a potluck. Man, do co-opers know how to potluck, so much good food was there! But I brought my leftovers from yesterday's dinner and stuck to them, other than the tad of salsa and chips I just couldn't resist that Blue Moon Farm brought to the party. I estimated the cost of that fabulous homemade salsa and the chips and put them in the budget.

Dinner was divine! A whole medium yam came to $0.90 at the co-op. While it was baking, I took 1/2 a cup black beans from my freezer that I had cooked from their dried state, which are immensely cheaper than canned beans. I went out to my trusty, messy garden again and picked what you see below:

Yes, that is two lovely red bell peppers and . . . dandelion greens! I just picked them out of my sidewalk. They are nutritionally terrific and, if picked when small, have a very mild flavor that blends in well with soups and stews. They are a free way to get some great nutrition, no need to go to the store. I also used an onion from my garden and added some fresh garlic, a tad of veggie bullion, a smidge of canola oil, and some spices (cumin and cinnamon.) When the yam was done I split it down the middle and smothered it in my simple black bean stew. Soooo filling, I almost didn't want to finish it, but I knew I'd be hungry later if I didn't, so I found room.

I had some change left for today so I put together a plan to defrost a small amount of free service berries from my freezer, mush them up, then mix them with 1 T half and half I had in the fridge, a pinch of sugar, and some leftover brown rice that needs using up. It'll be a very purple rice-pudding-ish kinda deal with lots of fruity antioxidants to round out my day.

I was tempted when I realized I'd be at this terrific potluck today to put aside the SNAP Challenge rules for one meal. Friends even asked me, "can't you just put aside the rules for one meal?" But that didn't feel right so I instead pulled out those leftovers and braved it through. Luckily some people there already knew why I wasn't eating with everyone else, but I found myself trying to hide what I was eating to a degree so I didn't have to explain over and over again and then take time making everyone else feel okay about it. I remember doing something similar with coworkers years and years ago. They would come back from lunch with gyros and fries (which I use to go get with them before a change of fortunes) and I'd be eating my PB&J and I'd have to make sure it seemed I was just fine with it, that it was no big deal, so they could be comfortable eating their more sumptuous meal in front of me. And I'd know they really didn't get it, that they had no idea what it was like to live as tight as I was then, and I'd feel our worlds pulling away from each other. Food is such a powerful cultural force, not being able to share in it together can create real distance.

I was asked the other day how it was economical how to use just a 1/4 cup of coconut milk in my ramrong over noodles recipe because they you had to find another use for the rest of that costly can quick or waste it. Ah ha, not so! I found this easy solution out of need one day.

Pour the leftover coconut milk into ice cube trays! Trays vary in size so you'll want to measure yours, but mine hold exactly 2 T of fluid per cube. I pour the milk into the ice cube tray, freeze it over night, then pop out the cubes the next day and put them in a zip lock freezer bag. Tada! No wasted coconut milk and a pre-measured amount of coconut milk available in seconds whenever I want to add a bit to a recipe.

My dad is visiting tomorrow and Tuesday. Do I send my partner, son, and dad out to eat without me or do I come up with such a great tasting cheap meal that they join me at the SNAP Challenge dinner table? I really don't know yet myself, off to plan. See you tomorrow!